Woodworking blog entries tagged with 'chisels'

As I have stated a few times before I have only been at this wood working game for just over 2 years now. A few months into this journey I graduated up to some chisels and mallet simply trying to understand the elementary basics of paring down wood. I believe the first task was a very green horn lap joint followed by smashing a mortice in..lol. Maybe smashing is the only way of the untrained hands as they yearn to make masterpieces, only while seeing them in our dreams until we can put as man...

Please click here for this image heavy post.
For those of you who don’t know me, I am an amateur astronomer (besides dabbling in woodworking, writing, art, etc…). I started an astronomy at Wordpress lately to post pictures I’ve been taking through my telescope and other tidbits. I thought of a way yesterday to merge my two biggest hobbies, astronomy and woodworking.
I decided to make a base for my Telrad reflex sight, to fit atop the Texas Yard Cannon. And, to make...

Well, I’ve been searching and looking high and low. Mainly for chisels and handplanes. I was looking for decent everyday tools, not collectibles. I didn’t want to spend a lot money since that would take away from the money I need for wood.
I started my search on ebay, progressed to various forum site member ads, watched craiglist, checked auction sites, newspaper classifieds. Then I began looking for new items in catalogs/websites/stores.
The prices I found for old tools wer...

The background…
Keeping the big project in mind, I realized I’d need to do some assembly work on sawhorses—yes, my bench, big as it is, isn’t big enough. The plastic Stanley horses my wife got me a few years back are just done. The little braces that keep the legs open have way to many delicate hooks and have all snapped off. I used them as long as possible, but they just suck—I think my wife was more upset when we discovered this than I was!
I’ve been meaning to build my own sawhorses ...

Well folks a little more progress slowly coming into form on the maple handle design.
Once more continuing to go about my shop efforts in a relaxed yet challenging pace. Shorter creative bursts giving forth an hour here or even a half hour there. I seem to leave the shop more satisfied knowing a more quality effort is being put into it all. The learning is actually becoming more than the old 3 hours straight and making various things with a mind almost in total fast forward mode with tools...

I used to hate students like me who know when the course starts but still show up late, mea culpa. I was 15 minutes late again today as I had to go into Winnipeg for my uncle’s funeral today. Usually we can drive in and out in good time but today the roads were terrible, with semis, pickups and cars littering the ditches along the Trans Canada… anyway we got there and back safely although at one point I thought I was going to have to attend a smash up on a bridge, but fortunatel...

Indian Paint Brushes
....the extension of my being, is the gifting of all things as one, just as the where-with-all of partaking from daily seeing, has now stepped forth to include my completed self as being finished and done….
And so at the end of the day on Saturday, I walked through the back yard and was drawn to the beauty of these….what we call, ‘Indian Paint Brushes’. When mowing out back we will skip large areas of the yard at times and leave this and othe...

Singing Mallets
....and so tis in this the moment of my arising, that the spewing forth of motley coloratura comes weaving heavens rhyme, where i am justified a vision quest of inseeing sensationalizing, that comes to me bearing up beyond my scope of cosmic time….
And so I thought that today I would post a couple of photos of some of the mallets that I have made. These are some that I now use and they, like the ones before them, will in likewise manner be retired with new ones to ...

I promised myself that I would not build any new projects until I completed my workbench. I have been making do for so long with substandard setups (even winning a "Most Pathetic Workbench" award from Woodworking Magazine), that it takes me at least twice as long on any project than it would with a proper workbench (and even WITH a proper workbench, I will probably take three times as long as you would). It was time to draw the line in the sawdust and say enough is enough.
I promised mysel...

Most people only talk about grain at the most superficial level of how it looks. We woodworkers enter the fibres. We tease the cells apart with the chisel’s edge and search for weaknesses and strengths in the species. We want to know these intimate details so we can exemplify the strengths and protect the weak from harm. I thought that it might help to give my personal insights into the different woods that I have worked with for almost five decades. Most of them are common enough, ...